Many learners are too frightened to raise an appeal on their exams. They think this may adversely affect their exam results, or even get them branded a ‘troublemaker’. But nothing could be further from the truth! Here we explain the benefits of submitting an exam appeal and how it can be done professionally and positively for everyone involved.
Like many things, it probably comes from childhood. At school you are conditioned not to question teachers or the school system. So when it comes to your professional qualifications, you expect the utmost integrity and professional rigour in the examination processes and it never crosses your mind that there could be reasonable grounds for appeal, or that a professional body could even have made a mistake.
Appeals are extremely beneficial for exam bodies. They help to highlight potential problems and in the spirit of genuine continuous improvement, without appeals how could anything ever improve over time?
Appeals are different from complaints. They simply raise a professional query about about an aspect of a process. Many professional bodies, such as the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS) refer to these appeals as ‘special considerations’.
We at Cordie operate an active “Reasonable Adjustments & Special Considerations” policy. We mirror the provisions of the CIPS awarding body and we proactively work with our learners to explore whether there are grounds for appeal and whether it is worth pursuing. You can find out more here.
Appeals are based on the concept of ‘fairness’ and in particular if you have grounds for challenging an exam mark or proactively highlighting specifics problems that prevented you from receiving a fair assessment. There are two main types of exam appeal operated by CIPS.
Category A Appeals (about the exam)
This is for any form of appeal about an exam you have just taken. You need to make the appeal as soon after the exam as possible. CIPS has a time limitation window of just 48 hours for these appeals, meaning that if you delay your appeal will serve no purpose.
The type of things to consider appealing are:
Distractions in the exam room (e.g. from external noise or other candidates)
Process breakdowns (e.g. the invigilator making mistakes or the timings going wrong)
Software errors (e.g. failings within the CIPS exam software)
Assessment errors (e.g. the wrong exam questions or questions that do not reflect the published syllabus)
Sudden illness, injury or other personal circumstances that make you unable to perform during the exam (NB. for which you are likely to need supporting with a medical certificate).
For most of these appeals, CIPS will review the situation and compare your appeal with the notes from the invigilator of your exam. If there is merit in the appeal, CIPS may in its own discretion apply an uplift on your marks (typically up to a maximum of 5% extra).
On some occasions, CIPS will offer the opportunity to resit the exam without any additional fee.
Category B Appeals (about the mark you’ve received)
This involves appealing against the mark you have received, for example in the rare occasion you think the mark you’ve been given does not bear any resemblance to the answers you submitted.
This type of appeal requires a fee (equivalent to the original exam fee) for your exam submission to be re-marked by a separate marker to the one who marked your original paper. If CIPS upgrades your mark, then you will receive a refund. However, if it upholds the original mark, then you will forfeit the fee you have paid.
Naturally, this serves as a deterrent on those wishing to ‘chance their arm’ for a re-mark!
Our advice is to only consider a Category B appeal on CR exams where your mark is extremely close to the pass/fail borderline, i.e. 47% or higher. In our experience, there are frequent occasions where the so-called independent marker gives exactly the same mark as the original marker.
BUT, why IS IT STILL IMPORTANT TO APPEAL?
Submitting appeals (particularly Category A appeals) is crucially important for Quality Control, as well as ensuring fairness to you. We have it on good authority directly from the senior leadership of CIPS that exam questions are Beta-tested in real live exams. This means your question may still be under ‘test’ by CIPS.
When reviewing the preliminary exam results, prior to publishing them to learners, CIPS undertakes a statistical analysis of all results. They are looking for specific trends and outliers within the statistics.
For example, if this month a study module has a pass-rate 20% lower than average and a 50% increase in appeals, then the statistics suggest there may be a problem with the original questions. This will allow CIPS to investigate to see if there has been a problem. The appeals allow CIPS to be proactive and head-off any unnecessary disappointment or errors in the results.
More broadly, if CIPS receives repeated appeals on issues such as ambiguity of question wording, relevance of the technical matter under examination, or the proportionality to which the exam is set in relation to the syllabus, then CIPS is able to adjust and improve its assessment processes.
This means better exam questions for everyone!
SO WHAT SHOULD I DO?
Get in touch! We will help you and advise whether we feel you have good grounds for an appeal.
Don’t delay! Remember there is a time limit on these appeals.
Be bold! Do not let some potential lack of fairness become the barrier to your ongoing career success.
Please get in touch with any of our experienced professional tutors for further discussion about your exam and how you found it. We have lots of experience, both as an approved exam centre and also a “centre of excellence” and an Ofsted accredited apprenticeship provider. We would love to help!